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Ancient DNA from Bronze Age Lebanon (Haber et al. 2017)

I've seen this paper's pre-print two months ago and have been discussing it since then. It has now officially been released, and a lot of nonsense about it has appeared in the media. Either way, I'm sure you people are well aware that population genetics has been a personal hobby of mine for over a decade now and that I'm active in the world of personal genomics. After talking about this on two different forums primarily concerned with population genetics, I figured this forum out of all places certainly deserves to know about this paper without going through the media's unsurprisingly low quality articles.

"The Canaanites inhabited the Levant region during the Bronze Age and established a culture which became influential in the Near East and beyond. However, the Canaanites, unlike most other ancient Near Easterners of this period, left few surviving textual records and thus their origin and relationship to ancient and present-day populations remain unclear. In this study, we sequenced five wholegenomes from ~3,700-year-old individuals from the city of Sidon, a major Canaanite city-state on the Eastern Mediterranean coast. We also sequenced the genomes of 99 individuals from present-day Lebanon to catalogue modern Levantine genetic diversity. We find that a Bronze Age Canaan-related ancestry was widespread in the region, shared among urban populations inhabiting the coast (Sidon) and inland populations (Jordan) who likely lived in farming societies or were pastoral nomads.

This Canaanite-related ancestry derived from mixture between local Neolithic populations and eastern migrants genetically related to Chalcolithic Iranians. We estimate, using linkage-disequilibrium decay patterns, that admixture occurred 6,600-3,550 years ago, coinciding with massive population movements in the mid-Holocene triggered by aridification ~4,200 years ago. We show that presentday Lebanese derive most of their ancestry from a Canaanite-related population, which therefore implies substantial genetic continuity in the Levant since at least the Bronze Age. In addition, we find Eurasian ancestry in the Lebanese not present in Bronze Age or earlier Levantines. We estimate this Eurasian ancestry arrived in the Levant around 3,750-2,170 years ago during a period of successive conquests by distant populations such as the Persians and Macedonians.

[...]

The PCA shows that Sidon_BA clusters with three individuals from Early Bronze Age Jordan (Jordan_BA) found in a cave above the Neolithic site of ‘Ain Ghazal and probably associated with an Early Bronze Age village close to the site.13 This suggests that people from the highly differentiated urban culture on the Levant coast and inland people with different modes of subsistence were nevertheless genetically similar, supporting previous reports that the different cultural groups who inhabited the Levant during the Bronze Age, such as the Ammonites, Moabites, Israelites and Phoenicians, each achieved their own cultural identities but all shared a common genetic and ethnic root with Canaanites.15 Lazaridis et al.13 reported that Jordan_BA can be modelled as mixture of Neolithic Levant (Levant_N) and Chalcolithic Iran (Iran_ChL). We computed the statistic f4(Levant_N, Sidon_BA; Ancient Eurasian, Chimpanzee) and found populations from the Caucasus and Iran shared more alleles with Sidon_BA than with Neolithic Levant (Figure 2A). We then used qpAdm8 (with parameter allsnps: YES) to test if Sidon_BA can be modelled as mixture of Levant_N and any other ancient population in the dataset and found good support for the model of Sidon_BA being a mixture of Levant_N (48.4± 4.2%) and Iran_ChL (51.6± 4.2%) (Figure 2B; Table S3).

In addition, the two Sidon_BA males carried the Y-chromosome haplogroups39 J-P58 (J1a2b) and JM12 (J2b) (Table 1 and S4; Figure S9), both common male lineages in the Near East today. We compiled frequencies of Y-chromosomal haplogroups in this geographical area and their changes over time in a dataset of ancient and modern Levantine populations (Figure S10), and note, similarly to Lazaridis et al.,13 that haplogroup J was absent in all Natufian and Neolithic Levant male individuals examined thus far, but emerged during the Bronze Age in Lebanon and Jordan along with ancestry related to Iran. All five Sidon_BA individuals had different mitochondrial DNA haplotypes40 (Table 1), belonging to paragroups common in present-day Lebanon and nearby regions (Table S5) but with additional derived variants not observed in our present-day Lebanese dataset. We next sought to estimate the time when the Iranian ancestry penetrated the Levant.

[...]

We found that the Lebanese can be best modeled as Sidon_BA 93% ± 1.6% and a Steppe Bronze Age population 7% ± 1.6% (Figure 3C; Table S6)."

Phoenicians / Canaanites are Arabs as they carry FGC11 like many Arab tribes so the chapter of being not Arabs is closed.
Any Lebanese not carry Haplogroup J1 ( P58 ) with the Mutation FGC11 is not Phoenician.

Phoenicians / Canaanites are Arabs as they carry FGC11 like many Arab tribes so the chapter of being not Arabs is closed.
Any Lebanese not carry Haplogroup J1 ( P58 ) with the Mutation FGC11 is not Phoenician.

J1-FGC11 is 4,500 years old, in other words its TMRCA dates back to a time when the Arabs did not even exist as a distinct group, in fact the sample itself predates the emergence of the Arabs. Moreover, Sidon_BA is J1-FGC11*, he tests negative for all the subclades of FGC11 (which are mainly Arabian nowadays), so it looks like a dead end. Besides, this is just a single sample, you'll see different branches of YSC234 (including my own) as we get more samples from Canaanite sites.

J1-FGC11 is 4,500 years old, in other words its TMRCA dates back to a time when the Arabs did not even exist as a distinct group, in fact the sample itself predates the emergence of the Arabs. Moreover, Sidon_BA is J1-FGC11*, he tests negative for all the subclades of FGC11 (which are mainly Arabian nowadays), so it looks like a dead end. Besides, this is just a single sample, you'll see different branches of YSC234 (including my own) as we get more samples from Canaanite sites.

Still, nice try

I am not arguing here who existed before the other one but to say that they are one people with one root but different titles ( names ) so either Arabs are Phoenicians or Phoenicians are Arabs, you can not separate them. From now and onwards any single Lebanese opens his mouth and shout that they are not Arabs immediately will be asked to do the test before any discussions.
Arabs existed on those days may be with different title depends on the geographical area. The science has proved that all nations with various titles like Arabs, Arameans, Phoenicians, Canaanites, Isaacs, Judahites ....etc belong to one root ( cousins and brothers ).

I am not arguing here who existed before the other one but to say that they are one people with one root but different titles ( names ) so either Arabs are Phoenicians or Phoenicians are Arabs, you can not separate them. From now and onwards any single Lebanese opens his mouth and shout that they are not Arabs immediately will be asked to do the test before any discussions.
Arabs existed on those days may be with different title depends on the geographical area. The science has proved that all nations with various titles like Arabs, Arameans, Phoenicians, Canaanites, Isaacs, Judahites ....etc belong to one root ( cousins and brothers ).

Actually, we can separate them. Just because a single Canaanite sample carried a presumably unsuccessful branch of FGC11 does not mean that Canaanites are Arabs or vice versa. This is to be expected in fact, since the Proto-Central Semitic speech community is likely to have carried many branches of YSC234, including FGC11 which turned out to be successful among Arabs and OSA speakers thanks to important founder effects. That's why Sidon_BA is negative for all the other, principally Arabian, branches of FGC11. You're just trying to use this to Arabise the region's past so as to gain legitimacy, but it's not going to work. Had this sample carried a typically Arabian branch of FGC11 such as FGC12, FGC1723 or FGC3723 instead of just being FGC11*, then you'd have a point, but that's simply not the case.

Actually, we can separate them. Just because a single Canaanite sample carried a presumably unsuccessful branch of FGC11 does not mean that Canaanites are Arabs or vice versa. This is to be expected in fact, since the Proto-Central Semitic speech community is likely to have carried many branches of YSC234, including FGC11 which turned out to be successful among Arabs and OSA speakers thanks to important founder effects. That's why Sidon_BA is negative for all the other, principally Arabian, branches of FGC11. You're just trying to use this to Arabise the region's past so as to gain legitimacy, but it's not going to work. Had this sample carried a typically Arabian branch of FGC11 such as FGC12, FGC1723 or FGC3723 instead of just being FGC11*, then you'd have a point, but that's simply not the case.

Let us wait for more samples in future but these small samples gave us good indications that the people of our region belong to one root mainly which is called scientifically Haplogroup J1 off course besides other HPs like J2,E1b, and other minorities.
Do you know you have an allergy toward the words Arab, Arabian,Arabism, Oroubah....etc if you can free yourself from it, you would be a better person without any bias!
Original People of the languages Aramean,Assyrian,Akkadian,Canaanian,Hebrew,Phoenic ian and Arabic must carry one Haplogroup which is J1 ( one family )

Let us wait for more samples in future but these small samples gave us good indications that the people of our region belong to one root mainly which is called scientifically Haplogroup J1 off course besides other HPs like J2,E1b, and other minorities.
Do you know you have an allergy toward the words Arab, Arabian,Arabism, Oroubah....etc if you can free yourself from it, you would be a better person without any bias!
Original People of the languages Aramean,Assyrian,Akkadian,Canaanian,Hebrew,Phoenic ian and Arabic must carry one Haplogroup which is J1 ( one family )

I have no allergy towards Arabs, however I do have a problem with the Arabisation and Islamisation of history, a rampant phenomenon that is almost never mentioned yet alone countered. The Canaanites were not Arabs, same thing for all the other non-Arab Semitic peoples out there (including the Sabaeans, Qatabanians, Hadramites and the Himyarites, although they were Arabian they were not Arab), one day you're going to have to accept this simple fact and move on.
Also, it is not necessary for Semitic speakers to have carried a single haplogroup, while J1-P58 was a major marker among the Proto-Semites, it is now obvious that it spread alongisde other lineages such as E-M34 and J2b1-M205 (found in another sample from this study as well as in a Bronze Age sample from 'Ayn Ghazal and an Iron Age mummy from Egypt, J1-Z2324 and J1-YSC234 were also found in both cases respectively). Think of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, who carried R1b-M269, R1a-Z645 and I2a2a-L699 (and probably J2b2 as well though it has yet to be found in early IEs), and keep in mind that these guys were roughly contemporary with the Proto-Semites.